This is the trailer for a reality program called Tiger Team which is going to be airing on CourtTV (which, by the way, will be renaming themselves TruTV in January).

It’s a reality show where they follow a company that does security penetration testing. You contract with them to break in to your facility. They give you a 30 day window in which they are going to attempt the break in, but they don’t tell you when and the don’t want you to warn anyone. During the break in they take/create some proof that they performed the task, and afterward they report back on what they did and how you could improve your security.

Having done some penetration testing in the past, security is still a hobby of mine. I found the show quite interesting. The first episode dealt with breaking in to a high end car dealership and the second episode dealt with breaking in to a high end jeweler. The approaches they took in the two episodes were very reasonable. In fact, they handled them pretty exactly as I would have, but they are much more practiced and have at least one trick I didn’t know about. The level of detail on the show was actually very good. You could follow along with that they were doing. They also didn’t sensationalize it to much.

How real is it? We’ll never know how much was set up by the producers, but my opinion is that it was mostly unscripted. In fact, they described the difficulty of getting the camera man to follow in their path without triggering the the motion detector, and that they had passed on some less safe alternatives for entry.

Someone on another blog mentioned that they were surprised they didn’t include a “kids don’t try this at home” message. I’ll say that here. Kids don’t try this at home. These guys are professionals. If these guys get caught by the police I’m sure they can pull out a letter from the owner saying that it was authorized. If you try this on your own, you’ll like get thrown in jail, hurt, or killed.

My final thoughts from the show:

Security is only as good as the weakest link. So pay attention to ways people can go around your security.

Security is inconvenient, more security is more inconvenient. The more security you add the better protected you are, but if you go too hard it becomes so inconvenient you can’t get your job down. (And people will work around that defeating your security.

There is no such thing as totally secure. (follow on to the previous item)

It’s a good thing criminals are generally dumb. The techniques used in this show really aren’t that hard. Hopefully criminals won’t get better at doing them by watching it.